8/22 Blue Day

I started off my day with narrowing down exactly what I would be teaching and when I would be taking over. I know that Monday I will be teaching about labor unions and working conditions during industrialization for about 30 minutes. Next, Friday I will be taking over the regular US History classes full time and I will need to be ready with lessons on urbanization and activities. Needless to say I have a busy weekend coming up.

Plan period and Enrichment consisted of me spending most of my time working on my own work and starting to make a seating chart where I put the kids interests and activities down in order to get to know who they are. I think making these connections is important to students. I also found time to volunteer to help with Homecoming and set up a time to observe a Government class since I will be licensed to teach Government as well.

There was confusion with having students email me there information so I clarified how they should email me at the beginning of the period. I received many more emails after that, but not all of them. I figured it was a very easy task that students would do immediately, but some are not interested or do not use their netbook.

I put together a quiz for the last period class on My Big Campus, instead of paper and pencil to get some practice using MBC. I was really shocked at how long it took to get kids online, signed in, and many of them did not have the netbook or it was not charged. What I hoped would take 5-10 minutes end up taking almost 45 minutes. This was a good learning experience and it was the first time using the new technology. I think from now on I will have a slide up on the board that has students log into their netbook and MBC account before the class starts.

I think I will continue to try and use technology with the netbooks, however many of them do not work well and the students do not seem to want to use them anymore. As Jon said, we have passed the technology being cool stage. Most of the students have phones in their pockets that are faster and can do more than their netbooks. I am going to find this kind of challenging, but I hope to find ways to make it more interesting in the future.